A demonstration of CSC/IBA Health's Lorenzo system was held on 6 November last year at Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. The local primary care trust reports that:

"... There remains to be a significant amount of development work to be completed in order for Lorenzo to be considered fit for purpose locally...all future dialogue and work with the SHA and CSC regarding Lorenzo deployment plans must be conducted jointly across the Local Health Community.

"The earliest release that can be considered locally is Release 2 which is planned forQ3 2009/10. However, the Board noted that timescales are subject to confirmation and from previous experiences it was anticipated that this would delay into 2010/11."

Reports in the US say that software glitches have endangered patients at the Veterans' Association.

The reports illustrate why e-record systems should be categorised, like some medical equipment, as safety-critical systems. When they go wrong the failures can, when humans don't spot the problem, lead to patients being harmed or worse.

In 2006 the Department of Health announced that Lord Warner, then a minister responsible for the NHS's £12.7bn National Programme for IT [NPfIT], was setting up a taskforce which would:

"draw on the work in this area done by the Veterans' Association in the United States which has had for some time a fully operational electronic patient record that benefits patients, doctors and medical education and is fully supported by the people in the medical profession who are involved in it".

The US report says:

"VA Software Glitches Endanger Patients

"Because of a software problem that began in August 2008 and persisted for about 4 months, a number of veterans received incorrect drug dosages. The Veterans Affairs Department did not disclose the errors to patients, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act. Medical data sometimes popped up under another patient's name, and stop orders, as for drugs like heparin, were not clearly displayed. Nearly one-third of 153 VA medical centers reported problems after the annual software upgrade was distributed."

When they were planning for ID Cards, executives at the Identity and Passport Service thought it a good idea to use the DWP's Oracle-based Customer Information System to store the biometrics part of the National Identity Register.

It avoided the costs, complexities, and risks of failure which would have cast a shadow over building a large database built from scratch.

The problem now is that, through practice rather than any specific plan, the DWP's CIS is becoming the government's main citizen database.

This means that thousands of council staff and other public and civil servants are being given access to it.

Health officials want to dissuade patients from opting out of the Summary Care Record, but are unsure how to go about it.

If too many patients opt out of a national database of summary health records clinicians may not trouble themselves to use it - and some may not trust it anyway. The summary care record is one of the main beams of the National Programme for IT [NPfIT].

The resumption makes it less likely that BT and the Department of Health will part company over the supplier's £1bn contract as London's local service provider under the National Programme for IT [NPfIT]. BT will be relieved to go to its financial year end with renewed activity on the London Programme for IT.

Matthew Swindells, the former interim NHS CIO who led a review of NHS Informatics, says that the NHS's National Programme for IT [NPfIT] should cease being presented as "The Solution" for the health service.

He has also called for a plurality of IT suppliers rather than reliance on the two local service providers CSC and BT. He said that two closed local service provider systems were a hindrance to government policy; and added that delays in implementations "necessitate changes to allow local organisations to take medium-term investment decisions now which won't be invalidated by NPfIT".

But it's unclear whether having an indirect relationship with Cerner will prove any more successful than having BT as an intermediary. BT supplies and installs the Cerner Millennium system in London as part of the NHS's National Programme for IT.

Homerton in London made a relative success of Cerner - but the trust signed a contract directly with Cerner and has been able to make the changes it wants - unlike other Cerner users.

The Times reports today that the National Audit Office is likely to investigate Whitehall's biggest computer projects and contracts after disclosures that their costs had exceeded the announced figures by more than £18 billion.

Edward Leigh, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "As a result of The Times's investigation I am going to immediately ask the Comptroller and Auditor-General [the head of the NAO] to investigate the whole matter of government IT spending and in particular the contracts highlighted in the paper."

The NAO, although independent of the government and Parliament, produces reports and briefings for the Public Accounts Committee and will usually agree to the committee's request for an investigation. The NAO has reported to the committee on several of the individual projects listed by The Times in its joint investigation with Computer Weekly but an aggregated report could point out common factors, problems and lessons.

He says that what is happening in the UK is giving US observers nightmares. So much for the NPfIT setting the standards worldwide, which was the message being conveyed across the globe in the early years of the programme.

Dr Cook's research includes the study of human error, the role of technology in human expert performance, and patient safety.

After The Times yesterday published the results of a joint investigation with Computer Weekly over government IT projects - contracts have cost at least £18bn more than first announced - a public sector employee has emailed to ask me why there was no mention of IBM.

As The Times says, the government is secretive about its IT contracts. Sometimes the government does not want Parliament or anyone else to know the name of the main IT contractor. This is despite the fact that Scope is on the list of the government's highest-priority "mission-critical" projects.

I understand from separate sources that IBM is the Cabinet Office's Scope system contractor, though neither the Cabinet Office nor IBM will comment.

On its front page today - and in a two-page spread inside - The Times has published a joint Times and Computer Weekly investigation on government IT including an opinion piece from us.

The articles refer to IT-based projects, programmes and contracts which have exceeded the original announced costs by more than £18bn.

MPs are fed up with failures of some large government IT-based projects and programmes - as are the government IT professionals, civil and public servants, and contractors who are achieving success on very limited budgets and find their work is overshadowed by the project Chimeras which have unrealistic time-frames and budgets.

The opinion and the analysis in The Times make it clear that we're not attacking government IT people but the way projects are approved without enough Parliamentary or external challenge to assumptions.